living out loud

March 11, 2007

Some days you’re driving and someone in a car near you is smoking and it wafts into your car and every now and then, when the right melancholy song is on the radio, it smells good.

Maybe you have to have smoked once or twice for that to be the case. To have felt it seer away pain and grief and anger and whatever else you couldn’t handle at the time. Maybe it just reminds you of being twenty; the freedom of a simpler life when you understood less but maybe experienced more, felt everything because it was difficult and exciting and you were still raw. But you grew up and you don’t want a cigarette today. Because you never really were a smoker anyway and you have moved through the pain.

What you learn in growing up is that you can run and hide and ignore it but the pain doesn’t go away. You have to face it, to call it by name in order to leave it behind.

And then the light turns green and a new song comes on and you keep driving.

Posted in: Life ~

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